imagination. In schools, Our Island Story starts with Roman Britain,
which is still basically seen as a Good Thing. There are no public statues
of Caratacus, leader of the native British resistance to the Roman
invasion under Claudius in AD 43; even Boudicca, who led a later revolt
of the Iceni against Rome (AD 60), has never really taken off as a
national folk hero on the scale of King Arthur, Elizabeth I, or Winston
Churchill. (Just try to think of a famous saying by Boudicca.)
In France, things are different. Ever since the Revolution, the idea of a
deep and mystical connection with “our ancestors the Gauls” has been
central to French national identity. It is telling that Asterix, the plucky
Gallic resistance fighter against the Roman occupier, has no British
equivalent. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century British imperialists could
cheerfully identify with Rome’s civilizing mission in barbarian lands; the
French, faced with the problem of incorporating three traumatic foreign
occupations into their national self-perception (1870, 1914, 1940), have
tended to identify with the native Gaulish Résistance against Rome.
The first date in French history, accordingly, is 52 BC, the year of the
great “national” revolt of the Gauls against Rome. Southern Gaul
(modern Provence and Languedoc) had been a Roman province since the
late second century BC; through a series of brutal campaigns in the early
50s BC, Julius Caesar had brought most of the rest of Gaul into the
Roman orbit. Early in 52 BC, Vercingetorix, the chieftain of a powerful
Celtic tribe in the Auvergne (the Arverni), assembled a vast alliance of
Gallic peoples to drive the Romans out of central Gaul. Caesar crushed
the rebellion with extraordinary savagery: his siege of Avaricum (near
Bourges) ended with the slaughter of all but 800 of the town’s 40,000
inhabitants. Vercingetorix himself surrendered to Caesar after the fall of
Alesia (Mont-Auxois, near Alise-Sainte-Reine) in September 52 BC, and
was later executed in Rome.